Nabhendu Sen (1944-2008), as an exhibition organised by his family at the Academy of Fine Arts revealed, was an artist and a sculptor and was involved in Bengali theatre
as a playwright, director and costumer as well. Trained at the Government College of
Art and Craft, Sen’s forte was naturalism. However, in these works, the influence of Cubism is quite obvious, although his subjects are drawn from Indian and Bengali cultures, both mythical and folk.
Some of his most beautiful works centre around village life and stories of gods. While
his child Krishna follows traditional iconography, his Ganesh Janani is more like
a flight of fancy. This also holds true for his best paintings, such as the one of two girls
swimming underwater (picture). The two young girls have a sinuous grace that gives the artwork a certain buoyancy. The piece is luminous, a quality it shares with his paintings of children. These paintings are straight out of folk rhymes and lullabies once popular in West Bengal.
Born in 1932, Narendra Chandra De Sarkar painted in the Bengal School style on a wide range of subjects chosen from Hindu and Christian mythologies, and urban as well as rural life. Abanindranath Tagore had first introduced this style as a reaction against the Western academic realism taught in art schools during British rule.
At De Sarkar’s exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, his Hindu deities and historical figures like Sri Krishna Chaitanya look fine with their long, delicate fingers. However, it is hard to imagine the working class, ragpickers and starving people with such refined physical attributes. Such a depiction becomes even more problematic when De Sarkar shows people from different walks of life joining a rally for the protection of workers’ rights or being ferried across a river. How can such workaday people be endowed with tender, champak-like fingers? As an artist, De Sarkar refuses to face the harsh realities of life. However, he must be commended for his vision of an egalitarian Indian society where everyone is treated equally irrespective of religion or caste.